April 17, 2008

Poem for Your Pocket

For many individuals, poetry seems to lack the pop and pizzazz of other
forms of artistic expression and entertainment. While this may be
superficially true, I have come to realize that the energy and drive of
a poem (at least the good ones) become apparent only from multiple
readings and intense interpretation. To extract the soul of a poem, the
reader must first be willing to bare his own. Unlike modern Western
theater and the contemporary cinematic experience (where the viewer is
rather passive, a recipient of expression), the poem requires an active
participant.

While I would love to write for hours on Keats,
or Yeats, or Blake, I haven’t the time. However, because it is National
Poem in Your Pocket Day (see today’s impressive Netcetera feature),
I feel compelled to share a bit of Auden: "Musée des Beaux-Arts." While
the poem covers a lot of philosophical and aesthetic territory, I have
always valued the continual relevance of its subject matter: our
ability as humans to continue our daily routines, our work, and our
entertainment (or poetry reading) with the knowledge that tragedy and
suffering are occurring simultaneously.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.